


Threaded In

by orphan_account



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Content Notes Inside, Limbo, M/M, Projections
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-11
Updated: 2012-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:46:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>A thousand Saitos across the dream, a thousand Cobbs, as many of them as shingles overlooking the garden. One leaves. A thousand remain. </i>Projections<i>, he says of them, none as real as me: this with the surety of a man incepted into the hubris of believing he is unique.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Threaded In

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings/content notes: deaths within a dream, suicide within a dream. The ending is neither.

A thousand Saitos across the dream, a thousand Cobbs, as many of them as shingles overlooking the garden. One leaves. A thousand remain. _Projections_ , Cobb says of them, none as real as me: this with the surety of a man incepted into the hubris of believing he is unique. 

When a tile loosens and you've leapt away to live your third borrowed life, who remains to see it fall?

+

This Saito buries himself deep in Cobb, touches the shoulders flexed back as though they could shrug away the room around them. He touches the leather he tied around Cobb's neck, soft enough to fit into this place without edges or beginnings, strong enough that in an hour they'll drop out the window together, Cobb's feet flapping in dreamwind like surrender signs. Touches the open O of Cobb's lips. In an hour they'll both have their mouths wide to the air, the breath that should flow through them caught in leather-strictured throats. But an hour, and even when the dream never ends they are men used to making the most of time.

Cobb squirms on Saito. He bunches his legs, forces backward until Saito finds the angle that makes him scream even with Saito shoved down his trachea. He squeezes down on Saito's fingers and Saito's cock until Saito lets him inhale just a bit of ambergris and salt. He chokes again. He keep trying to gulp down too much. Saito thrusts hard hips— he's thin, this one, as though the irreality of the shadows that bring out his brows also carves at his waist— up against Cobb's ass and rams his arm against Cobb's neck at the same time. He feels so good not breathing (and Cobb can't at all), the scent of Cobb fixed in his nostrils, that they almost die too early. Cobb reaches back with his head, a reminder, hair sweeping Saito's eyelids, Saito kissing into his sweat, huge inside him with memory of every time before; thrusts until neither of them can bear it they're so close to coming and Saito leads Cobb forward, all limbs as they try to stay plastered to each other, to the hard sweet thrusts of _this is real_. Saito ties leather over the windowsill and Cobb turns enough to give him access to his collarbone and allows this man arrogant enough to think this time they'll make it out a kiss. _Ready_ , Saito says, too arrogant to inquire.

They jump. Somewhere another Saito splashes onto the rocks, coughing. A Cobb squints at him, checking his last straggly bristles of hair where no bruises ever mottled the neck, and tosses his gun into the water.

+

The second Cobb wobbles like a turtle out of the sea. He wanders the beach for a while looking at houses. Houses and not homes, for Cobb; justice laughs when she tosses the last iteration of him onto the shore, for now there exists one of him for every life he and Mal carelessly sketched into their own buildings.

At first he and the Saito he meets engage in philosophical fencing. They argue about youth in a land where they never wake up teenagers. They quote fairy tales and proverbs at each other until one day Cobb wakes to a sun-dressed princess eating pomegranates off his chest, and Saito declares an end. They're well aware their world is a creation, because Saito never picks apart any of the handrolls that appear on his nightstand and Cobb never runs out of sneakers to hurl into the waves. They discover that their material needs are met— fish flop in mountain ponds and corn sprouts from the sand, a feat Cobb accuses Saito of because _he_ definitely studied ecology in university— but not their emotional or intellectual ones to know. Saito blames Cobb for not having more Saitos to support himself with, because it's definitely Cobb's architectural mind, used to divvying up lands and finding equitable loads and fair resource distributions, that spread them and their other-selves over the land like train stations.

They slice through the Gordian knot of theory by dropping themselves off the roof until, exhausted of introducing themselves to each other over and over, they decide to live out a life until it's old.

In the space of forty years and the need to have someone who once was real, a thing grows. They live together, high in the mountains where only once a month does the sea dreamwind flood their house with discontent. 

The two hundred and fifty-seventh Saito finds it funny to hold a funeral for the dead Cobb still clasped in the second Saito's arms. His own Cobb is not amused.

+

This Saito curls his body carefully over Cobb to not wake him up. Cobb's chest rises and falls, his nipples barely visible inside the best linen Saito could imagine embroidered with tiny ties. Cobb had been angry when he first saw it, a crease forming between his eyebrows, before Saito had smoothed it away with a conciliatory line and a story about Saville Row that made Cobb smile again. Until Cobb remembered Arthur and his ties, Fischer, and Fischer's lapels neat as Fischer strode through the living world. A memoranda. It drove him away from where they constructed castles by the shore and back inside to brood.

So Saito said _No_ and brought Cobb back to bed.

The weight of their own imaginative power holds them down as much the incense and the handwoven quilt. Everything reminds Cobb of something. The incense of Saito's original dream, the first one they ever met in, when it was nighttime as it never has been since, although then it was an acrid and aware scent and now only a prickle. The quilt lashed together by some projection who is not-Cobb and not-Saito, and all the other-Cobbs and other-Saitos sleeping under the same eternal sun as they lie, drowsy in the sheets. Saito kisses Cobb's stomach like an apology for the myriad others turning their own Cobbs boneless. He kneels pliant for Cobb to finger him, doesn't move when Cobb inserts another level and slow. He leans until he's bowed like an arched bridge while Cobb explores him instead of the matrix outside. The morning glints off the sand in his eyelashes as Cobb brings him off, then rubs himself to a finish against Saito's quads. He falls asleep within the approximation of a minute.

Drop drop. Sand flees out of Saito's clothing and trundles a broken hourglass onto the shore.

+

Saito says, _You could build anything. Correct me if I am wrong._

 _So can you._ Cobb's hands are folded over his eyes. _Why don't you?_

_You are the one who has done it before. My trade is in the finances, not the delivery of impossibility._

_I'm the one who's had enough of impossible fucking things for a lifetime,_ says Cobb. _If you don't want a quiet life, I'll find one of you that does_ , and plunges off the rocks.

+

This Saito grins as he tears at Cobb's shirt. Fireworks explode around them, one metal contraption _boom_ feet from their laughing faces, and Cobb only takes Saito into his mouth, gaze intent on the taut skin across Saito's pubic bone. Saito, hardening, rises to a kiss, falls into shudders under Cobb's desultory tongue. Their helicopter swoops aimlessly through the sky as Saito stops piloting it, but it doesn't matter. They scrabble over each other waiting for it to fall. It dives into the hills while Saito's still crying senseless. Soil joins the burst of joy behind Saito's closed eyes.

For a while after their bodies lie crumpled there until a Cobb, older in threadbare jacket and lover's bruises, shrugs and bundles them away to the communal graveyard.

+

One day, maybe many different days, Saito asks Cobb, _Do you think anyone will ever come for us?_

He rolls in the bed, punches his pillow into the best shape for two, kicks at the blankets, and finally runs out of things to not say. _Are you suggesting something, Professor?_

 _Maybe we are meant to come for someone else,_ Saito says. _Would you like to take a leap of faith with me, and become truly young again?_

_Okay, spit it out._

Saito reaches over his shoulder, where a PASIV sits on the nightstand, quiescent and terrible. _You seem to be waiting for a way out._

_But the right way is in, you're telling me._

_I did not— Yes._

He stares at the PASIV, which gives him no guidance at all, and turns to the steady light in Saito's face.

 _I wasn't,_ he says, _but I'll come with you. Yes._

There's no need for ceremony when they've known each other for so long, or perhaps it's so short a time, when they bind themselves into the PASIV together and Saito extends two fingers for the button, smiling bright enough to wipe out the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> All kinds of feedback are welcome and appreciated!


End file.
